Scales of Contact: Architecture & Global Infrastructures, an exhibition of architecture research by Taubman College graduate students, opens to the public at the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History this Monday, December 16.

Ten students collaboratively designed and fabricated a modified cabinet-of-curiosities to contain select images, drawings, and models from the fall semester’s Vast Machines architecture studio taught by Assistant Professor Meredith Miller. Centered in the museum’s rotunda, the white plastic monolith is punctured by multiple view-holes, offering glimpses of the students’ globally-oriented design and research projects, represented in miniature. The ten student projects each proposed an “earth observatory” at the intersection of a particular global system and the local environments, material conditions, and visual cultures that system intersects.

Studio Brief:
The recent book by Paul N. Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming, discusses the controversy around climate science over the authority of data models versus empirical observation. Requiring an extensive global infrastructure of data gathering and weather monitoring, scholarship and policy, instruments and standards, climate models synthesize data amassed at the scale of the world. They fill in gaps between measurements, account for variations in instruments, and advance comprehensive predictions based on dynamic patterns run forward. It could be argued then that the model is a more complete representation of reality than observable reality itself.

Cosmology and cosmography set the stage for globalization; imaginations of the world in its entirety precede direct access to the globe through sight. Well before the Apollo photographs of the “whole earth” came to symbolize an emerging ecological consciousness, visual representations and conceptual models made sensible various theories about planetary mechanics and lent an aesthetic sensibility to the political, theological, and existential ideas associated with them.

With the Whole Earth generation as our precedent, the VAST MACHINES studio identifies new technologies of planetary consequence, updates the political issues at stake and defines the current sensibilities of today’s “Whole Earth.” Student projects explicate specific infrastructures of global knowledge and exchange as the context for local acts of architecture. The exhibition, Scales of Contact, concludes the term by reformatting their studio projects as a collection of possible worlds.